THIS WEEK: Hot, Threads and Jaws

The daily average temperature this past week was 0.08 F warmer than any other of record-keeping.

The average global air temperature in midweek was, however, 62.9 F. You say, but that's pretty cold. Sure, but you're also averaging in the Arctic and Antarctic, etc.

Why so hot? Said to be a combination of global warming, summer and the advent of El Niño. And it should get even hotter into next month.

Europe suffered its hottest June, ever.
It's winter in the Antarctic, but parts of this continent and nearby ocean were 18-36F higher than the 1979-2000 average.
2016 was the hottest year ever, when we faced the last major El Niño.
Chances are high that this month of July will be our warmest ever. According to Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University, ever means since the Eemian interglacial period 120,000 years ago.

UN Secretary General António Guterres said, if we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation, as the last two records in temperature demonstrates. He was referring to the two all-time highs this past Tuesday and Wednesday.

I will soon post on Twitter vs Threads, but the latter was launched by Meta this past week, and within two hours Wednesday evening 2 million people downloaded the app, a copycat to Twitter.

Mark Zuckerberg reported Threads reached 30 million users in less than 24 hours.

Instagram took 15 months to reach 30 million downloads, and TikTok took two years.
Sign ups surpassed 70 million by Friday morning, and users posted more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes.

Threads might have been #2 to Nintendo's Mario Kart Tour.
Keep in mind that Twitter has 368 million users.
Elon Musk hinted that Meta stole trade secrets.
Zuckerberg took a swipe at Twitter by saying Threads would be "focusing on kindness."

Early adopters of Threads include Bill Gates, Shakira and Oprah Winfrey, along with brands like Netflix.
Will Threads become a Twitter-killer? Stay tuned.

Nothing to do with an app, but the most frightening film I might have ever seen was Threads, which I reviewed three years ago. Here is my monthly gift to you. Click on this and you can watch the entire 2 hour movie. But you might not want to do this. Here is one quote: I saw this first in the 1980s and had nightmares for some time afterwards. It is a horrible movie, not in the sense that it's badly made -- it's definitely not -- but it pulls NO punches. Unlike "The Day After", there is no reasonably clean hospital scenes ... no rosy hope that somehow we will make it past a nuclear war, regroup, and rebuild. This makes that old saw very clear: after a nuclear war, the living will envy the dead.

Also just this week in Florida, a video showed beachgoers fleeing the ocean after a shark started circling swimmers in shallow water.

Over the past week I've watched almost the entire Jaws series, and have just begun Jaws the Revenge, given 0 and 15 ratings by Rotten Tomatoes. Michael Caine and Mario Van Peebles are in it. The headliner was Lorraine Gary, who was the wife of the sheriff in the original. Not sure if I'll ever complete this one. Jaws III, incidentally, got 11/17, II 62/30 and Jaws an outstanding 97/90. Stars were Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton. Steven Spielberg directed.

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicious and troublesome. This strain has also been spreading in

Part 3: OUR NEXT AROUND THE WORLD ODYSSEY

Before I get into my third, and final, part of this cruise series, let me start with some more newsworthy topics. Thursday was my pandemic day for years. Thus, every so often I return to bring you up to date on the latest developments. All these subvariants derived from that Omicron variant, and each quickly became dominant, with slightly different symptoms. One of these will shock you. There has been a significant decline in the lost of taste and smell. From two-thirds of early patients to now only 10-20% show these symptoms. JN.1, now the dominant subvariant, results in mostly mild symptoms. However, once JN.1 infects some, there seem to be longer-lasting symptoms. Clearly, the latest booster helps prevent contracting Covid. A competing subvariant, BA.2.86, also known as Pirola , a month ago made a run, but JN.1 prevailed. No variant in particular, but research has shown that some of you will begin to lose hair for several months. This is caused by stress more than anythi

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These are held every five years, and there have only been

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